ZYMERON CORPORATION — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NCI

Description

Photodynamic therapyPDTutilizes light beam to activate photosensitizers to produce cytotoxic reactive oxygen speciesROSand it has been proposed as a potent treatment to combine with Radiation TherapyRTespecially for the idea of using X ray beam to locally activate PDTXPDTMajority studies about XPDT have used nanoscintillators as the X ray transducer to activate photosensitizersHoweverthe materials used to prepare nanoscintillators usually consist of rare earth or heavy metal elements which possess a significant drug safety issue and their biocompatibility and tolerability in humans have not been studiedthus limiting the clinical translation of such strategiesCompared to the nanoscintillator based XPDTCherenkov radiation induced by X ray provides an alternative approach to realize X PDTIt has been demonstrated that biological tissues such as tumors can produce Cherenkov luminescence when treated by either radionuclides or external X ray beams and the technique advances have enabled the clinical application of Cherenkov radiation for tumor tracking in patientsThere are numerous evidences that photosensitizers can be activated by high energy X ray to generate ROSBased on thisZymeron develops a multi functional formulation to allow a novel combinational treatment modality of X ray based RT and PDT